


Interlude: Roominghouse, Winter

by betweenheroesandvillains



Series: The Palinode of Armitage Hux [2]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Bleakness, Physical Therapy, implied past suicide attempt, infinite softness despite everything, showering, the home-made version of therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-12 01:42:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18001400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betweenheroesandvillains/pseuds/betweenheroesandvillains
Summary: He was an amalgam of healing aches – bones re-fusing, severed muscles and skin growing back together. There were parts that would take far longer to become even close to healed.





	Interlude: Roominghouse, Winter

**Author's Note:**

> The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive. Frostbite does not hurt until it starts to thaw. […] And then, every winter after, it aches. And every season since is winter, and I still do ache.
> 
> – Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Winter settled between them like a wall, cold and white and quiet.

Hux had to admit, in his rare moments of absolute clarity, that he had not thought of it. Winter seemed such a distant thing while they were groping for something beyond survival.  
But now the cold was pulling on his wounds, the scars that had not healed fully yet. He felt old as his fingers, once broken and re-broken, turned stiff. Ancient, as they wouldn't hold a mug.  
Half the mornings he had to fight to get up as the darkness set itself over the planet and his body gave in. It stirred up memories he had kept buried, of pain and humiliation and surrender.  
Hux threw himself into exercises with vigour to keep himself from remembering too much.

Rey walked the length and breadth of the house. She walked its depths and heights. She walked its circumference, she walked its area. She was like a dangerous, deadly animal stuck in a far too small cage. Hux watched her from his spots, the kitchen table, the floor of the living room. With every bit of cleverness left inside him he tried to judge how brittle she was, when she would snap.

She didn't belong in the house. That was his domain. Something pulled Rey towards the outside, but the cold sent her back in.

–

_For weeks, he had only known the outside by its name. Other places he knew by heart: The room he slept in with its window that didn't open and wouldn't break, its bedside table that must have held a lamp for the longest time if the circles in the wood were anything to go by, the almost empty chest of drawers next to the door, the chair in the corner. Oh, the chair with its smooth black wood. The chair he couldn't lift. The chair that held him upright when the wall wasn't good enough. He loved and hated the chair with a vengeance. Loved and hated it so much he had given it a name, some name, whatever name, and had called it Rae.  
The bathroom adjacent to his room – small, completely tiled in a sickening green. Whoever had done it must have been colour blind. He had a toilet crammed next to the shower and right opposite the sink. Over the sink a mirror. On the sink his toothbrush. The soap wandered from the sink to the shower depending on his mood. Behind the door two towels that were about as soft as sandpaper but did their job._

_For three weeks he had not known any other place. His muscles, too atrophied even after he had begun healing, would not carry him for long. In the first days he had even needed Rey's help to go to the bathroom. Had he not been sure about having lost his dignity months before, it would have been embarrassing. But his body was too broken to feel much beyond heaviness. He was an amalgam of healing aches – bones re-fusing, severed muscles and skin growing back together. There were parts that would take far longer to become even close to healed. The nerves of his arms and hands that he had severed in an attempt to – in some stupid, heroic moment, were angry reminders of that._

_He needed help with the most mundane of tasks in the beginning. Rey was there in the mornings and the evenings, hand-feeding him rations that he knew the exact nutritional value of although almost everything else about his brain seemed hazy and frayed. She held both, his head and the mug to get him to drink. She would look after all his wounds and scrutinize him sharply when she found scratched-open spots or pulled sutures. Half the time he didn't notice. He drifted off a lot in these days, into a space between memories and nightmares._

–

For the longest time Hux had wondered if she rued having taken him in. The thought stung for a reason he couldn't quite discern. Her not wanting him around led down a dark path he couldn't allow himself to consider. Instead, he haunted the house like a spectre – half existing and half somewhere else entirely. Making himself familiar with the shape of every door, every crooked floorboard. As long as he had walking to concentrate on, he didn't have to worry about every other part of himself.

They made a study out of avoiding each other. If one came downstairs, the other would try to slip upstairs. If one was in the kitchen, the other would remain in the living room. The slow motion of two galaxies colliding: You thought they might just miss it, but then gravity made them crash into each other. Or maybe more like volcanoes: Moving glacier-slow on the surface, but something bubbling underneath.  
Hux lost count of the times he watched her around a corner as she watched through the window how the storms cut through trees. Going outside would have been insane, and not even the two of them were that broken yet. Close, but not quite.

–  
_He had to re-learn how to hold a bowl. A spoon. A mug. The muscles in his arms, wasted for a reason he tried not to dwell on, had hardly been anything beyond a thin layer between his skin and his bones. He had made a point of not looking at himself when he got dressed or undressed. He was still, always, reeling, unsure of who or what he was, and who are what he had been. Outside him was the world he so desperately wanted both, to touch and to never be close to again. Inside him – inside him the void._  
_Sometimes he even knew what that void meant. When he woke up in the middle of the night from another nightmare, and felt the tendrils of something in his mind that was so enormous, so beyond life and death, that all he could do was to lie still and hope it didn't notice him... In these moments he remembered that he had been dead. Had not just attempted to kill himself, but had succeeded. And that something (his mind flickered, went over Rey's hands, Rey's hair, Rey's touch) or someone must have taken him back.  
He never managed to fall asleep again after such thoughts. He would try to have his right thumb touch all the other fingers until the sun went up and he could get up and get dressed._

–

“Why,” she asked as she collected the shards of the broken bottle and Hux had a million answers at the tip of his tongue but said nothing. Any word would have meant admitting defeat, and he was so defeated already that he couldn't give away this last bit. Rey spent the following days next to him. They didn't speak, so she brought books while he went through the excruciating feat of using his muscles. Some part of him, and he put a considerable amount of time into not thinking about where that part came from, knew about rebuilding muscles from scratch. He submitted himself to that part while Rey sat on the chair she had dragged in and read.  
No. Didn't read.  
As he began lifting his legs in what felt like endless repetitions he watched her face and hands and realized it.  
She wasn't reading. She was counting. Counting the words on a page. The lines. The numbers of pages. It showed in the ways her eyes skipped over the black ink, how her fingers played with the edges of pages still left. He didn't comment on it.  
When she deemed him stable enough to stay alone he got himself an empty bottle and a handful of small cogs.

–

Winter went on because time was not in the habit of stopping. Even when it felt like it had. Even when the night seemed like it would never end.

“My hair is getting too long.”  
He had rehearsed the sentence in his head the whole day, the inflection and precise timing of each word. Rey didn't seem to notice.  
She looked up from where she had all pieces of a disassembled widget laid out in a neat order. Hux tried to show what he meant by running his fingers through his hair, and for the first time that day, his hands didn't betray him.  
“I see.” She got up and left the room, going somewhere Hux couldn't see her. All sharp and pointy tools were hers to command. She only barely trusted him with dull kitchen knives.

They had done this many times before. Hux followed her up the stairs and into his room, then turned left into the bathroom and sat down in the shower. That was the cleanest way of doing it. A bit of water afterwards and all proof of it would go down the drain.  
They were quiet while she was cutting. They never talked, and neither of them was one to break a routine.

–

_They crashed into each other one night.  
Hux, awake for fifty hours because sleep only brought memories he would break all his fingers again to forget. The exhaustion had settled in the back of his throat and filled his head with fluffy static. He was shaking from the caf running through his veins. He was sitting in the dark because turning on the light seemed unbearable. In the back of his mind, a very small idea told him that he was about five minutes away from hallucinating. Which was why it took him a full two minutes to realize that Rey had slipped into the chair next to him._

_There was no need for him to see her to know what she looked like. After all those months, he knew Rey's face by heart. He knew about the worried crease between her eyebrows, about the sharp downwards curve of her mouth. Rey's under-eye circles were been dark smudges, a stark contrast to her light skin._  
_The silence that had stretched between them was so full of something meaningful that even Hux in his hardly conscious state felt it. His wrapped his arms around his chest. Felt every bone he could. Pressed two fingers into the hole inserting his artificial lung had left just to feel the dull pain of it._  
_Hux reminded himself that it had been either this or death. They both were alive. That had to count for something. It_ had _to.  
They simmered in their silence for hours. Until the first low morning sunlight filtered through the clouds._

_Rey reached out towards him and touched his knee. Inside his head he felt something weave through his thoughts. He heard a sharp echo, less words and more of a feeling: “Don't leave me.”  
Inside his ribcage, the answer was hammering against his sternum. “I never could.”_

–

“Done.”  
Her tone was gentle as she brushed some hairs off his shoulders. It was the only softness she allowed towards him. She wasn't a gentle person by nature. And either way, they only lived side by side. Interacting at the edges of their routines.

“How far do you trust me?”  
He asked the question out of impulse, and pressed his fingernails into the flesh of his palms when it was out.  
Rey gave him a long look. Her mouth twitched as she scrutinized him.  
She handed him the scissors.  
“Cut it all off.”  
There was a long moment after his fingers had curled around the handle when Hux did not know what to do with himself. She climbed inside the shower, pulled her hair back into a ponytail.  
Hux's gaze flickered between her hair and the scissors. There was a string of possibilities running through his head, all the things he could do now, the harm he could cause, the suffering he could end.  
He climbed into the shower behind her and sat down gingerly. Her hair was almost black against her pallid skin. In the low light, he could even pretend to not see her scars.  
“All of it,” he croaked, his voice just air scraping against his dry mouth.  
“All of it,” she answered.  
So he did exactly that.

She looked different, afterwards. Sharper. Stranger.  
He had tried to give her hair some sort of shape, leaving some longer strands to frame her face while attempting to crop everything else short. His hands had started shaking only minutes after he had started, but he had persisted.  
As he looked at her, as she looked back up at him in the crammed closeness of the shower, he half felt as if he was looking into a mirror.  
Rey cracked a smile like one would accidentally crack an egg: sharply, with something unexpected leaking out. Pride maybe. He wouldn't dare to label it happiness. He cracked the same smile back at her. Her eyes followed the line of his lips for an intense moment.  
Then she turned on the shower. The lukewarm water sprayed all over them, soaking their clothes in seconds. Their cut-off hair went down the drain as Rey threw her head back and laughed without a sound. Hux felt like he was frozen in place just by her presence. He could not avert his eyes as she peeled out of her clothes unconsciously. Long stretches of white skin emerged, the bird-small bones of her clavicles almost seeming like they were trying to escape.  
And yet she was at home in herself as she scraped the last wisps of hair off the back of her neck. She pushed her trousers down to her ankles, unafraid of looking at her legs. She ran her hands over her scars without flinching. Her muscles obeyed as she picked up the wet pile of clothes and threw them into the sink with infallible aim.  
As she took some soap and closed her eyes to wash her hair, it was as if Hux was pulled out of a trance. The urge to bolt hissed under his skin.

Instead, he thought of the mirror again. He thought of the past. He thought of the last time he had stepped into a shower without trying to vibrate out of his body, without all his nerves being on edge, when his body had still worked the way it was supposed to.  
Before he could overthink it, Hux pulled his pullover over his head and kicked it out of the shower. Just a body, he told himself. Just a body, nothing else. He peeled trousers and pants from his skin. Just a body. It didn't matter. There was nothing to see. Just his limbs moving. He didn't think of the scars holding him together. He didn't run his hands over the side of his chest.  
Hux combed through his shorter hair with both hands to keep them occupied. A part of him was painfully aware of Rey's presence. Another part was doing his best to ignore her.  
He closed his eyes, aware of his dilemma. Pretending not to remember everything that hurt meant acting like he didn't have a memory. Acting like he didn't have a body at the same time left him with nothing to concentrate on. He was a void, but his fatal flaw was that he existed. That he could not un-exist. That he had the scars to prove that, and -  
Something pushed against his thoughts. Hux held his breath as the achingly familiar sensation, water running down his face. His fears were quieted. Calm flooded his veins. It was like pushing pressure on a haemorrhaging wound.  
Hux reached out, his fingers hovering what he assumed to be inches from Rey's skin. He wanted to say something, but words could not cover his emotions.  
Rey closed her fingers around his wrist and turned his palm up. “Your worries are too loud.”  
Then she pushed the soap in his hand, nonchalant. Just the way he handed her the mug of caf in the morning. Just the way she had set his nose. Just the way. Just.  
Just her words the first night when he couldn't sleep: “You are safe.”  
Slowly, Hux began scrubbing himself clean.

–

Slowly, surely, the year rolled on its back and died.

The fact remained that he was alive. He had to deal with that.

**Author's Note:**

> Technically, this is set between Eternal Winter and the (yet unpublished) Prequel, but I needed to get this out.


End file.
